Making representative democracy more
representative. Can new forms of
citizen governance in the UK open up
democracy?
Peter John,
Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG)
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
website: http://www.ipeg.org.uk/staff/john/index.php
For Workshop ‘Social Capital, the State and Diversity’, ECPR Joint Sessions 2007,
Helsinki, Finland, 7 - 12 May
1
Abstract
Surveys consistently show the strong link between social and economic status (SES) and
political participation, with people of higher income and education levels
being more likely to be politically involved. There is an assumption that
the representation bias in participation is an enduring feature of
modern societies and remains largely constant over time. However, new initiatives
to involve the citizen directly in government decision-making - citizen
governance - may be based on different kinds of representation because they
draw from service users and where hard to reach groups are sought out. To
test the idea that citizen governance may be more representative than
conventional forms of participation, this paper uses data from the English and Welsh
Citizenship Survey 2005. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, it findS
some evidence that citizen governance in more representative than civic activities and
other patterns of group membership.
2
Many decades of survey-based studies conclude that the key measures of political
participation – voting, more active forms of involvement, citizen contacting and group
membership – are skewed toward those with higher income, higher employment status
and more years of education, factors that cluster together (Milbraith, Verba et al 1972,
Barnes and Kaase 1979, Jennings and van Deth 1989, Verba et al 1993, Verba et al
1995). Even with the recent advances in understanding of political participation,
incorporating the role of context, skills and psychological factors, socio-economic status
(SES) remains as important as a prior factor. In the most comprehensive analysis of
participation, Verba et al (1995) find that SES determines the skills that in turn affect
participation. In most studies, years of education and being in employment usually
appear as part of a standard battery of statistical controls in multivariate models (e.g.
Pattie et al 2005: 152-185).
The dominance of SES runs across comparative studies
(Verba et al 1978) and in surveys of political participation in countries, such as the UK,
where similar results are found (Parry et al 1992: 63-84). The main exception is citizen
initiated contacts with public officials (Verba and Nie 1972); but subsequent research
upholds the relationship between SES and participation (Sharp 1982, Serra 1995: 182).
Political scientists worry about the bias in political participation because theories of
democracy depend on political equality (e.g. Dahl 1953): democracy is more than the
formal right to participate but involves substantive political representation. A common
reaction to the disjuncture between theory and practice has usually been to accept that
inequalities derive from deep rooted social structures, which are hard to change, but to
observe that democracies work reasonably well even with these limitations; that voting is
3
the most powerful form of voice and the one in which most of the citizens participate;
that there is not a significant difference between participators and non-participators
(Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980, Bennet and Resnick 1989, Highton and Wolfinger
2001); and that the recent generation of studies show that SES is not a strong predictor of
participation with much of the explanation done by self-interested and psychological
factors, which are only partially correlated to SES. But, as Verba et al’s (1991)
qualifications to these arguments suggest, the sense of unease continues: there is a
possible link between the inequality in representation and the outputs and outcomes of a
democracy, and that equality in political representation is also symbolically important for
a legitimate political system. Such preoccupations prompted Lijphart (1997, 2001) to
advocate compulsory voting.
It might be thought that the rise of new political movements and initiatives to get a more
direct contact between the citizen and the state - in the form the institutions of direct
democracy - would open up democratic choice, partly because they involve new groups.
But these two have unequal access: as Dalton et al summarise, when compared to voting,
‘A much larger inequality gap emerges for modes of participation that come closer to
direct or advocate forms of democracy’ (2003: 262).
But it may be the case that other
kinds of new democratic mechanism may have a more representative base. The argument
of this paper is that the democratic practices that are shaped by public agencies,
organizing citizens and inviting them to participate in service-related forums, may have
this quality. This occurs first because the state in western democracies typically
administers a complex array of services, many of which involve frequent contact with the
4
citizens even without their direct involvement in decision-making. In the more
traditional top down model of the state-citizen relationship, citizens vote for people to sit
in office to administer bureaucracies; once those policies are in place they accept the
decisions of the professionals to administer them in their best interests (Thompson 1983).
Decades of challenges to the traditional bureaucratic means for delivering services, which
entail the autonomy of professionals, have now led to a reassessment of the citizen-state
relationship, which involves a more active role for the citizen in choosing services and
voicing demands, and a more responsive bureaucracy that is interested in listening to the
demands of these groups (Whitaker 1980). More voice necessitates initiatives that
include the citizens and allow them to represent their interests, not just individually, but
collectively through forums that relate to particular services and gather together the users
and other affected interests in forums or involve the citizen in directly providing and
shaping the delivery of those services. They occur in regeneration, crime and education
particularly, and usually involve meetings and consultations. While these citizen
initiatives have been cross-national, the UK has pushed them much further than
elsewhere with a commitment to civil renewal and a new type of citizen governance as a
core feature of its recent policies (Brannan et al 2006).
This paper addresses the idea that these initiatives may involve a different kind of citizen
in its deliberations, one that is more representative of the general population than
commonly occurs in other forms of engagement, such as group participation. The theory
is that there may be aspects of this engagement that encourage a wider range of groups to
participate. The first is that the group that is recruited from service users or those closely
5
affected by the service has a different representative basis than in a wider sample base.
Users may be council house tenants or those affected by crime in deprived areas. This
sampling bias may help correct, though not totally rebalance, the natural bias in
representation. Secondly, being asked is one of the key factors that influence the decision
to participate, such as being mobilized or canvassed (Rosenstone and Hansen 2003,
Gerber and Green 2005). These groups often rely on professionals asking people to
participate, which when combined with the first factor, may produce a more
representative sample of participants. This contrasts with the self-starting characteristics
of traditional involvement, which rely on voluntary action from participants supported by
networks of family and friends; though of course who is asked is linked to socioeconomic status (Rosenstone and Hansen 2003). Of course, there may be some
similarities as these state-sponsored forms of participation may have networks and have
activists at their core; but we expect the balance to be different and for SES to be a
weaker determinant than other forms of participation. Third, linked to the second factor,
is that these initiatives have as their aim to include excluded groups and to go beyond the
range of the usual suspects. Given this it would be surprising if the representatives on
these groups would not in some way be more representative than standard forms of
representation. Of course, it is not a fore-ordained conclusion that citizen governance
does have this different character because the resource imbalance will mean still lead to
biases in participation. Empirical evidence is needed to investigate whether this is the
case.
6
Data and Methods
Surveys about civic behaviour do not ask directly about participation in these decisionmaking forums, mainly because they were not until recently a major component of
participation and from the tendency for survey instruments to replicate some well known
question wordings, with these civil renewal activities being caught up in other types of
political participation. As Baumgartner and Walker (1988: 913-914) comment, the
same family of questions with respect to group membership has been in operation with
some modifications since the 1920s, and influenced the seminal 1967 Verba and Nie
(1972) survey, which continued beyond that time, such ‘service’ or school service, which
also has been the same question in the General Social Survey between 1971-1984.
Baumgartner and Walker refine the categories which include more citizen governance
activities through reference to community or neighbourhood organizations. In the
American Citizen Participation Study, 1990 (Verba et al 1995), the number of
organizations increases including neighbourhood/homeowners/condominion association
or block club, which may include some of the housing elements of citizen governance
when in the public sector as do ‘heath service organizations/organization for services to
needy’, and educational institutions, school service organisations’. UK data is similarly
presented, with the Citizen’s Audit providing residents, housing and neighbourhood
organisations, and the PTA (Pattie et al 2004: 98). Here there are small numbers
involved with these similarly labeled activities, with one per cent members of the PTA
(3.7 per cent participating), 5 per cent members of a residents association and 6.7 per cent
7
participating. However, this does not capture the full range of activities. In addition, the
main questions about acts of participation, such as signing a petition or taking part in a
demonstration or rally, have as part of their assumption the voluntaristic and active basis
of much participation, so do not cover citizen governance activities that depend on a
more gradual interaction between decision-makers. Of course, all participation is
mobilized and networked to a degree; but the implication of the question wording is that
self-motivation plays a strong role with much of it.
The Citizenship Survey is a biannual random probability face-to-face survey taking place
in England and Wales, using computer assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), which
occurred in 2001, 2003 and 2005. It has a core achieved sample of about 10,000
respondents. In 2005, it was sampled from the post code address file, with a two stage
sampling procedure to select the addresses. At the first stage a random sample of census
area statistics (CAS) wards was selected, then wards in a second stage. All tables and
regression results are adjusted by the application of a weight based on the difference
between respondents and non-respondents (see Michaelson et al 2005 for further details
of the sampling and weighting scheme).
In the 2005, for the first time, the Citizenship survey asked questions on citizen
governance: ‘in the last twelve months … have you done any of the things listed’, with a
card referring to seven actions: ‘member of a group making decisions on local health
services’; ‘member of a decision-making group set up to regenerate the local area’;
‘member of a decision-making group set up to tackle local crime problems’; ‘member of
8
a tenants group decision-making committee’; ‘member of a group making decisions on
local education services’; ‘member of a group making decisions on local services for
young people’; and ‘member of another group making decisions on services in the local
community’. There is some cross over with the standard option for the group
membership questions for neighbourhood and community groups, which are also asked in
the Citizenship Survey but this option is specifically targeted at decision-making for
public services, so researchers can be sure it applies only for citizen governance
activities. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the responses to this question.
9
Table 1:
Frequencies for core citizen governance activities
Member of a group
making decisions on
local health services
Member of a decision
making group to
regenerate the local
area
Member of a decision
making group to
tackle local crime
problems
Member of a tenants
group decision making
committee
Member of a group
making decisions on
local education
services
Member of a group
making decisions on
local services for
young people
Member of another
group making
decisions on services
in the local area
No activities
Per cent
0.8
N
9691
1.8
9691
1.6
9691
1.7
9691
1.3
9691
2.8
9691
2.8
9691
91.5
9691
When taking each service in turn, there are not many people doing these activities for
each service at about one to two per cent of the sample. But if we examine the figure for
no activities, it comes to about 8.3 per cent of the sample. Adding together the activities,
it comes to 5.9 doing one, with 1.4 per cent doing two, and much smaller numbers for the
10
others. The mean level for the whole population is .13, 1.48 among those who do this
kind of decision-making.
These questions cut to the core of what is citizen governance, but there are other activities
that are closely linked but which are not quite the same thing. One is the direct
participation in service delivery in ways that have a decision-making content – what may
be called the co-production of services. Here the survey asked respondents about
activities that did not relate to their job with the options of school governor, a volunteer
special constable and magistrate. The question also included the question about a local
councillor, which we exclude from the citizen governance categorization, where the
descriptive statistics appear in table 2, but where the no activities also include not being a
councillor.
Table 2: Frequencies for the co-production of public services
A school governor
A volunteer Special
Constable
A Magistrate
No activities
Per cent
1.2
0.1
N
9691
9691
0.2
98.0
9691
9691
Here we find much with same proportions for school governors at one per cent, but very
few volunteer constables and magistrates. When added together, these activities form 1.4
per cent of the sample with no overlaps.
11
Taking both decision-making and co-production together, these activities are not rare
occurrences in the population. If you add together all the activities and do not double
count, we get 9 per cent, with 13.6 per cent doing it at least once a week, 32.7 at least
once a month with 50.9 per cent less often. When asked how many times during the last
year, the respondents showed an average of 3.5 times per year, with a wide standard
deviation of 3.7.
Finally, a less active form of citizen governance is consultation about public services in
the form of answering questionnaires and surveys. Here there are a surprising number of
people who claim to have been involved. The question asked respondents ‘In the last
twelve months have you taken part in a consultation about local services or problems in
your local area in any of the ways listed’: 13.7 per cent completed a questionnaire, six
per cent attended a public meeting and 4.6 per cent involved with a group set up to
discuss local services and problems in the local area. If all the forms of citizens
governance are taken together – direct involvement, co-production and consultation
makes for a 23.9 per cent of the population who have been part of these citizen
governance activities, nearly a quarter of the adult population.
Because of the diverse nature of the activities and the tendency for citizens just to do one
thing, we need to create a composite score. First, we should deal with the issue of double
counting, which does not affect the 23.8 per cent because we used those who did not
score any activity as the method of calculation. It also is not a large problem because
16.5 per cent carried out one activity. There are some activities where there is the
12
possibility of double counting. Here some of the consultation and citizen governance
activities are rather similar, such as between attending public meeting and being involved
with a group with the questions on involvement with groups on various service areas.
And it does appear that some of the respondents do indicate both of these activities: 26
per cent of those who said they were a member of a group to discuss local health services
also said they attended a meeting to discuss local services and problems; 12.9 per cent of
those who attended a group to discuss local regeneration, with similar proportions for the
other specialized activities. There were similar cross memberships for the question about
being involved with a local group. The third issue is the extent to which co-production is
the same as group membership to discuss service issues. Here a principal components
analysis can find out if there is a scale. Table 3 shows the extraction, which show high
figures for each factor. The procedure produces four factors with eigenvalues in excess
of one, which load in varying degree on the factors, with factors one and two loading on
the decision-making variables and factor three on the co-governance variables. Over all
the case for separating these activities off is not persuasive, especially as being a school
governor loads on factor one.
13
Table 3: Communalities and component matrix from a principal components
analysis of citizen governance activities
A school governor
A volunteer Special
Constable
A Magistrate
Member of a group
making decisions on
local health services
Member of a decision
making group to
regenerate the local
area
Member of a decision
making group to
tackle local crime
problems
Member of a tenants
group decision making
committee
Member of a group
making decisions on
local education
services
Member of a group
making decisions on
local services for
young people
Member of another
group making
decisions on services
in the local area
Extracti
on
.702
.717
1
2
3
4
.447
.016
-.664
.147
.249
.759
-.018
-.345
.790
.261
.064
.252
-.066
.007
.273
-.222
.841
-.385
.492
.639
.246
-.123
.087
.425
.490
.407
.137
-.001
.441
.367
.427
.352
-.010
.693
.580
-.577
.110
-.107
.413
.595
.012
-.243
.014
.451
.606
.183
-.202
.097
The core of the argument depends on finding out who the people who participate in
citizen governance, especially when compared to those who carry out other acts of
political participation other than voting as we wished to examine broadly comparable
forms of involvement. For the civic activities, we use the questions about direct
14
participation, which have a different character to citizen governance. These are questions
about whether the respondents ‘Attended a public meeting or rally’, ‘Taken part in public
demonstration’, and ‘Signed a petition’, activities that load highly on a factor and have an
alpha of .34. The other kind of comparison is with group membership when it has a
political dimension, many of which have a political dimension, though it is hard to know
how much this involves. For the purposes of comparison, we add together all forms of
group membership except education activities, where there is a crossover with citizen
governance, and local community or neighbourhood groups as discussed earlier. This set
of variables yields an alpha of .43. Factor analysis yields a respectable fit, with only
sport not loading highly onto the first factor.
An initial question is whether these two groups of civic participation and citizen
governance are similar to each other. Here we find that 4.6 of the total do both, 22.2 per
cent do just civic activities, and 4.1 per cent of the sample do just citizen governance,
which is a reasonable number of people to bring into the political arena. Citizen
governance is reaching a new group of people, not just the usual suspects. The second
and main question is the extent to which these activities are predicted by the standard
SES indicators and other measures of difference in the population. Table 4 presents
Kendal tau-b correlations for the key variables for civic participation, group membership
and citizen governance, dichotomised so as to facilitate comparisons.
later to the substantive interpretation of these coefficients.
15
We will come
Table 4: kendall tau-b correlations of civic participation, group membership and
citizen governance
Income
In employment
Age
Civic
Participa
tion
.108**
.090**
-.038**
White
No Qualifications
N
8952
9833
9833
Group
Member
ship
.032**
.068**
-.029**
6143
6615
6615
Citizen
governa
nce
.077**
.031**
.010
.060**
-.102**
9833
9833
Qualifications below
higher education
-.061**
Higher education
N
8953
9847
9833
.025**
-.066**
6615
6615
.002
-.061**
9846
9847
9428
-.020
6389
-.061**
9433
.174**
9428
.070**
6389
.121**
9433
Owner
.020**
9822
-.040**
6606
.037**
9836
Gender
-.037**
9833
.058**
6615
-.008
9847
**=correlation significant at the .01 level, two tailed
In pure SES terms – education and income – there is a contrast between civic and citizen
governance, with the latter having more of a claim to be representative of the general
population. This is also the case with group participation in spite of the diverse activities
recorded. Citizen governance is more representative than group membership with respect
to income, employment, ethnic background, people with out qualitifications and gender.
Civic participation is less representative than the other two types in all categories
16
considered here except for home ownership. Group membership is more representative
than civic behaviour and citizen governance with respect to education.
A further way to examine the impact of SES is to construct a regression model with the
same covariates for the different sorts of participation. SES variables in any case appear
in most regression models, so this kind of analysis is not controversial.
We include the
following variables: gender on the basis that there are differences in participation,
especially in group membership and that link to differences in resources. Age on the
basis that higher age leads to greater participation on the basis of resources and a growing
sense of a stake in the community. Individual income on the basis that this is one of the
core SES links to participation. Then the three measures of qualifications: having no
qualifications, some qualifications at less than degree level, and degree level
qualifications, whether in work or not, whether white or not, whether actively practicing a
religion, the degree of attachment to the neighbourhood, which measure a sense of
investment in local decision-making, measured by a question asking ‘I would like to talk
you how strongly do you belong to your immediate neighbourhood’, with responses
1=very strongly, 2=strongly, 3=not very strongly, 4=not at all strongly. As with many
studies of participation, we include efficacy, measured by the question, ‘do you agree or
disagree that you can you can influence decisions affecting your local area?’, with
responses as 1=’definitely agree’, 2=‘tend to agree’,3=’tend to disagree’ and
4=’definitely disagree’. Finally, following Putnam (2000) we include the number of
hours the respondents report watching television during weekdays on the expectation that
this will reduce participation and group activity.
17
Table 5 presents the results from a probit of the three dependent variables. The
coefficients are similar to an odds ratio, which again allows for comparison across the
tables.
The table controls for the clustering of the error terms in local authority areas.
18
Table 6: Probit on civic participation, group membership and citizen governance standard errors in parentheses
Civic
Group
Citizen
Participation Membership governance
Income
.015**
(.004)
-.003
(.008)
.014**
(.005)
In employment
-.038
(.043)
.194*
(.076)
-.112
(.060)
Age
-.001
(.001)
.0003
(.002)
-.0009
(.001)
White
.369**
(.068)
-.013
(.119)
.103
(.095)
No Qualifications
-.091
(.059)
-.171
(.094)
.091
(.075)
Qualifications below higher .209**
(.049)
.097
(.084)
.105
(.061)
Higher education
.352**
(.043)
.193*
(.077)
.336**
(.051)
Owner
.003
(.061)
-.243*
(.111)
.091
(.076)
Gender
-.118**
(.035)
.241**
(.058)
.007
(.043)
Practice religion
.136**
(.036)
.438**
(.075)
.250**
(.049)
Neighbourhood attachment
-.066**
(.021)
.023
(.035)
-.135**
(.028)
Local Efficacy
-.111**
(.022)
-.063
(.036)
-.224**
(.027)
Television watching
-.023**
(.007)
-.019
(.012)
-.015**
(.007)
Log-pseudolikelihood
-4612.5
-1194.4
-2370.0
Pseudo-R
.05
.05
.07
N
8058
5587
8059
19
The results broadly replicate the correlations, but with some terms rendered insignificant
because of the controls. In terms of the key terms, income is similar across civic
participation and citizen governance, with group membership having less bias. In
employment, on the other hand, it only group membership that has an impact. Race and
having no qualifications are only factors for civic participation. Higher education is
most important for civic participation. Citizen governance is gender neutral it seems.
Although the signs and strengths of coefficients points toward the superiority of citizen
governance, especially over civic participation the varying results, it is hard to come to
conclusion about the relative importance of SES from this data because of the number of
variables. One solution is to create a summary variable. We save a variable from an
underlying factor from household income, the three measures of qualifications (with no
qualifications reversed as a variable) and ethnic background, a scale that has an alpha of
.29. When plugged back into the regression as a replacement for these variables and with
the remaining independent variables generates a coefficient of .167 and a standard error
of .017 for civic participation, .075 for group membership (.034, standard error) and .139
for citizen governance (.022). Here we find the general pattern replicates with citizen
governance beating civic participation, but with the more general group membership as
the more representative.
It is more useful to see what the impact of the predicted values are visually so we can
compare plots of the impact of SES on these results. We show these results in figures 1-3
20
for respectively civic participation, group membership and citizen governance. The gp
curve is the simulated predicted value, using the Clarify programme, with 95 per cent
confidence bands on each side. Here we find that citizen governance has a lower slope,
reaching across a wider range of SES cases.
Figure 1
The impact of SES on civic participation
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8178
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6204
5922
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5358
5076
4794
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Preducted value
Figure 2
Impact of SES on Group Membership
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Figure 3
Impact of SES on Citizen Governance
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0
The limited direct questions on this new activity mean that it is hard to find out exactly
what motivates people to do it and whether there are particular reasons for a more
representative make up. But there are indirect ways of tapping into the bases for this
support. One is the idea that these people are service users, which tend to be more
representative of the population. Table 6 presents correlations with the groups, but this
is not the case as civic participation beats citizen governance all times, though citizen
governance beats group membership.
23
Table 7: kendall tab-b correlations of civic participation, group membership and
citizen governance with service contact
Civic Participation
Group membership
Citizen governance
Local doctors
surgery
Local hospital
.044(**)
-.008
.013
.055(**)
-.016
.037(**)
Local school
.110(**)
-.012
.098(**)
.002
-.039(**)
.044(**)
.156(**)
.038(**)
.151(**)
.046(**)
.044(**)
.006
.068(**)
.019
.035(**)
The Crown
Prosecution Service
The Home Office
.042(**)
.002
.031(**)
.053(**)
.012
.042(**)
The Police
.151(**)
.032(**)
.094(**)
.024(*)
.006
.034(**)
.024(*)
.013
.041(**)
.037(**)
.019
.070(**)
9827
6613
9830
Council housing
department/ HA
A local council
apart from housing
department
A private landlord
or letting agent
The courts
The immigration
authorities
The Prison Service
The Probation
Service
N
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
* Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
24
If a direct interest is not one that is the prime driver of citizen governance, then what is
motivating people to do this kind of civic activity?
Here we have in mind that classic
acts of political participation have mixed forms of motivation that come from direct
interest in key events that happen to people to the more public interest groups. Here we
have a direct question to the people who carry out the citizen governance activities:
‘Which if any of these benefits do you get from this /these activity / activities’, with six
choices and an other’. Table 7 reports these activities. Here shows that people who get
involve above all want to be connected and to make a difference in their communities;
much less cited the direct benefits from this form of participation. This shows that
government are able to tap into elements of good will and public spiritedness, which can
sustain citizen governance, and which underlies that it is a different kind of participation
with a different kind of appeal than other kinds of participation, perhaps less tainted in
the public eye.
25
Table 8: benefits from citizen governance activities
A sense of
involvement in the
community
Getting to know
people in the
community
Being able to make a
difference in the
community
68.5
N
881
57.5
881
67.6
881
Enjoyment of or
interest in the activity
53.4
881
Learning new skills or
helping to develop my
career
20.9
881
Building self-esteem
or confidence
25.9
881
Other benefits
4.1
881
No benefits
3.1
881
Conclusions
If there is one message from the long research on political participation, it is that the
social bases to participation are well entrenched, and that patterns of involvement should
remain fairly constant over time and across the different types of people in a society. The
introduction of new kinds of citizen representation from the general population in
England and Wales is intended to shift the balance of participation so it is not just reliant
26
on conventional voluntaristic forms of engagement but could encompass a greater
representativeness of the population through the direct connection to service issues and
attention to populations normally excluded from direct involvement. On the other, hand
it would be wrong to expect these new mechanisms to be radically different in make up
from other sort, more a question of degree. The social structures that give rise to
different skills are likely to replicated in new forms of participation. The opportunity is
the marginal differences that different avenues of recruitment and tapping community
based forms of motivation can give.
The results from the Citizenship Survey are consistent with this incremental line of
reasoning. In terms of descriptive statistics, we find differences in representation across
the main categories between civic participation and citizen governance. These results
are replicated in the regression analysis, with higher coefficients for civic participation
than the citizen governance. But substantively, the results do not amount to a massive
difference, with also group participation scoring much higher levels of
representativeness. The detailed results also show variations, with the main difference
being in education rather than income. On the other hand, ethnicity is an important area
of difference. Even if the kind of person who is doing citizen governance is not so
different to those doing other activities, the new people brought into participation from
this route – about four per cent of the population - may compensate for the fall in
conventional types of activity over the last few years.
27
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30
Appendix 1: civic participation, group membership and citizen governance by key
demographic characteristics
Income < 5,000
Income 5,000-9,999
Income 10,000-14,999
Income 14,000-19,999
Income 20,000-29,999
Income 30,000-49,999
Income 50,000-74,999
Income > 75,000
In employment
Age (mean)
Civic
Participa
tion
20.2
16.5
14.5
12.0
18.7
12.8
3.0
2.4
67.0
44.9
Group
Member
ship
21.2
17.1
14.7
12.5
16.8
13.1
2.7
1.9
65.6
44.8
Citizen
governa
nce
20.3
16.5
12.3
11.8
18.7
14.0
3.1
3.2
64.9
46.8
23.4
19.4
15.1
11.8
15.4
10.8
2.4
1.7
60.2
46.4
White
No Qualifications
92.7
10.2
90.2
11.5
89.8
9.4
89.7
16.5
Qualifications below
higher education
48.0
52.0
44.1
53.8
Higher education
41.5
35.3
46.3
29.0
Owner
83.1
80.3
86.4
81.6
Gender (male)
45.4
48.5
47.0
48.4
31
Total
Appendix 2: OLS on number of acts civic participation, group membership and
citizen governance - standardized betas, t-values in parentheses
Civic
Group
Citizen
Participation Membership governance
Income
.047
(2.96)
.012
(0.7)
.024
(1.52)
In employment
-.025
(.006)
.012
(.98)
-.014
(-1.01)
Age
.014
(.78)
.022
(1.09)
.024
(1.46)
White
.077
(5.89)
.060
(3.79)
.021
(.61)
No Qualifications
.006
(.43)
.032
(-1.97)
.017
(1.26)
Qualifications below higher .099
(5.5)
.067
(3.4)
.051
(2.65)
Higher education
.146
(9.15)
.162
(9.32)
.091
(5.82)
Owner
-.001
(-.13)
-.001
(-.08)
.010
(.77)
Gender
-.035
(2.87)
-.011
(.077)
.005
(.46)
Practice religion
. 043
(3.32)
.178
(11.35)
.051
(3.76)
Neighbourhood attachment
-.045
(-3.57)
-.050
(-3.57)
-.058
(5.69)
Local Efficacy
-.079
(5.96)
-.106
(7.08)
-.124
(8.62)
Television watching
-.045
(3.84)
-.047
(
-.024
(2.82)
R
.06
.10
.05
N
8058
5587
8059
32
33